Winners of the Alastria Open Call! Building value through diverse DLT capabilities

Hello dear friends!

It is an immense honour to be able to write this post, since we’re going to tell you about our experience in the Alastria Open Call (AOC) of this year, in which we’ve won one of the prizes.

We participated developing a Proof of Concept (PoC) focused on last mile package delivery services.

Before explaining our proposal, allow me to explain what AOC is. But even before that, what is Alastria? According to their website:

Alastria is the first multisectorial consortium promoted by organizations and institutions for the establishment of a semi-public Blockchain/DLT infrastructure, supporting services with legal effectiveness in the Spanish scope and according with European regulation. The consortium is open to any organization that wishes to have available a fundamental tool for the development of its own Blockchain/DLT strategy with the aim of distributing and organizing products and services for the Spanish market. Alastria can be summarized as a semipublic, independent, permissioned and neutral Blockchain/DLT network, designed to be accordant with the existent regulation, that enables the associates to experiment this technologies in a cooperative environment.

The AOC is a challenge that Alastria launched to commemorate its first year of life, proposing from its ECOs (its sectorial organizational units) different challenges to be solved in two weeks. We thought it was a great opportunity to collaborate closely with our friends at GeoDB, so we prepared a proposal to work together in one of the ECOs, we were selected as finalists and the rest is history.

In our proposal we have created a delegated package delivery solution, in which we’re inspired by our personal experiences buying physical goods online. We assume that, like us, many of you’ve had difficulties managing the reception of a package when you are on the move. Don’t you think it would be great to be able to manage who and where can receive a package with all the guarantees offered by a DLT?

This was our initial proposal, which became a bit daunting as we had no experience with Alastria and their testnet! However, difficulties have never set us back so we launched into a sprint race in which our team has proven its worth to work with new ideas and find solutions, something that allows us to continue working confidently in our GeoDB proposal. By the way, do you want to join such a great team?. We’re hiring!

Alastria is a permissioned DLT, and only its members can use a node. In this AOC Alastria put at our disposal a permissioned API to use their Self Sovereing Identity (SSI) solution, Alastria ID or A-ID. A-ID is great and in our opinion, it’ll be used by all of the Spanish society very soon. But leaving aside the romanticism, to win this AOC we had to go a step further and after experimenting with different ideas we decided to use A-ID in combination with a public DLT to keep a record of all events (deliveries and delegations of authorizations) signed by the participants.

In our opinion, there is no public DLT better adapted for this than IOTA.

The only problem we still had to solve was how to index the messages registered in IOTA. IOTA signatures makes it impossible to use a private key associated with a public key with which to sign multiple messages in a secure way. But hey! We have A-ID! Let each store sign orders with an A-ID, let each user sign with theirs, send this information to a single IOTA address and then retrieve the information and read only those messages that contain a valid A-ID signature.